What is the key to a good marriage? I would love to hear your answers. A recent study examines a number of shifting ideas among Americans not only as to what makes a marriage good, but what role do children play in the making of happy matrimony. Here’s the overview:

The Pew Research Center survey on marriage and parenting found that children had fallen to eighth out of nine on a list of factors that people associate with successful marriages well behind “sharing household chores,” “good housing,” “adequate income,” a “happy sexual relationship” and “faithfulness.”

Seventeen years ago, children ranked third in importance among the items listed in the most recent study. Sixty-two percent of the respondents to the survey felt that “chore-sharing” was very important for a happy marriage. Perhaps this is another telling indicator of the high divorce rate. When chore-sharing is what you find fulfilling, your relationship is little more than a buddy-system, not a marriage.

Where the Creation account reminds the first couple that their first commandment was to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:26ff), the current approach of the modern couple appears to be: be fair, balanced and equitable in the distribution and expectation of who will mow the yard and clean the dishes. Ah, the elements of marital bliss.

One family-policy expert gave her take on why child-rearing is less important today:

“The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults,” she wrote in a recent report. “Child-rearing values sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity seem stale and musty by comparison.”

A sociologist gave her two-cents saying that workplaces are generally not “family-friendly,” making it less desirable to have children if neither of the two working spouses have adequate child-care facilities at work. I suppose this same sociologist did not view the mother staying at home and the father being a breadwinner (and consequently, the two limiting their materialism to one income) as “chore-sharing.”

I realize that the last paragraph did not take into consideration single-parent families. The study shows:

that 37 percent of U.S. births in 2005 were to unmarried women, up from 5 percent in 1960, and found that nearly half of all adults in their 30s and 40s had lived with a partner outside of marriage.

In other words, marriage itself has become less important or necessary. The spiral is becoming a slide. This is not my lack of compassion for single mothers. My wife and I have personally invested a large amount of time in helping single mothers in our church who have a host of struggles. Needless to say, our world-view, nor the world-view of the single parents we have helped, does not parallel that of the single parents who obviously don’t want a spouse or a biblical approach to life.

According to the study:

71 percent of Americans say the growth in births to unwed mothers is a “big problem.” About the same proportion 69 percent said a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.

Thus, we are a confused populace. We need chore-sharing but not children to have happy marriages and we need two parents (with adequate work-place child care) to have happy childhoods. If the paid day-care worker is the one spending the majority of time with a child during his/her waking hours, why would a mom and dad be all that important. I know, I’m getting in real deep here.

I haven’t learned much about parenting in the past five months of having an infant (now two) in our home. But I have learned a little. I am rapidly learning about gospel-centered happiness in a home with children. When I read this report, my heart aches for the children who will be birthed to parents who think that equity among house-hold responsibilities are more valuable and leads to greater joy than children. I grieve for those couples who pursue careers and possessions and social status as higher priorities than children. I grieve for those who willingly pursue and advocate being a single parent so as to avoid the mess of marriage.

My antiquated recommendation is a biblical worldview. We need churches that do more than popularize cliché’s for conservative family morals. We need the personal and social revolution that comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ; the revolution that reverses world-views and makes the out-dated mindset of Scripture the standard for genuine happiness. We need the direct and personal involvement of the community of Christ in the lives of its people on more days than a regularly attended worship service. We need to reinstitute church discipline that will lovingly confront and restore those who have begun to drink from the empty cisterns of secular society rather than feast on the rich and hearty banquet of eternal joy found in the Bible.

I am praying and looking for ways I can be more aggressive in this field. Practicality is important here. This study reminds me to plan more aggressively in how I can live and help others live more focused for the glory of God.